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When Holly is twelve, she sits behind the wheel for the first time. The seat is pushed all the way to the front and in her hands, she holds the steering wheel tight.
She’s not that short—spring went by with a growth spurt—but even then, she has to stretch her left leg out till her knee pops to press the clutch all the way down, has to straighten her back into a neat line to be able to peek past the dashboard, above the hood, just to see the road clearly.
Her dad has decided to teach her how to drive. They’re in a half-empty Walmart parking lot—on an early Sunday morning, to beat the church-goers—sitting in a rust-colored two-seater that smells like cheap leather and wheezes like an old dog. Her father doesn’t like it much. His car had burnt down with the house, to which an endless back-and-forth with the insurance company followed, and this was their prize for it.
Why now, all of the sudden, Holly doesn’t understand. None of her friends have even begun talking about getting a license. Her school and every grocery store is close enough to get to by foot or bus and it’s not like her dad needs a private chauffeur for his work. He hardly lets her come to any investigations, anyway.
“You ease off the clutch.” He mimes the pedal with his hand, the way it angles off the floor. “Slowly, slowly, until you start to feel it vibrating.” He waits for something Holly can’t sense. “Now the gas.”
With her right foot, she gets off the brakes and onto the gas. The car seesaws, bounces back on its wheels, and goes silent.
“That was too slow.” He clicks his tongue. “Foot on the clutch again, with more gas this time.” He turns the keys. The engine howls. “Again, slowly, until you feel the pedal shaking.”
Every muscle in Holly’s leg has tensed up: it’s beginning to shake. “I’m not feeling it.”
“Take off your shoe, then.” He yanks the e-brake.
Holly reaches for her foot in the tight space and pulls her shoe off.
Her dad looks over. “Feeling it now?”
“Yeah,” she says even though she’s not sure. Something feels different about the pedal.
“Stay there,” her dad orders. It feels impossible, almost. Her leg is starting to cramp from keeping this position too long. She feels it all the way down to the arch of her foot. “That’s the bite point. That’s when you start pressing your foot down on the gas pedal. You don’t let go of it until your car is moving.”
Holly tries it again: the clutch rumbles against her foot, and she stays right there. Then, she hits the gas. The car moves a bit too abruptly, which startles her. It rolls and comes to a stop.
"That was better," her father says. "Again."
She tries it again, two, three, four times, until Holly’s sure she’s gotten halfway across the parking lot just by letting the car bob up and down.
“Dad, nobody drives a stick anyway these days. They’ve been phasing them out for years.”
“Doesn’t matter,” her father says. “Still a bunch of old cars lying around. And you gotta know how to drive every one of ‘em.” He takes a drag from his cigarette. “What happens when you’re stranded in the middle of Europe and the only car you’ve got around is a manual?”
“I’m not gonna get stranded in Europe.”
“You don’t know that,” her father points out. She feels something in her head boil at that. It feels like they’ve been clashing more often than not, another topic to disagree on everyday. “When shit happens—and you know it’s only a matter of time before it will—you can’t just depend on God to send you a kind guardian angel who knows how to drive a manual.”
She sighs, looking out of the window. The after-church customers are beginning to fill the place. “So what?”
He doesn’t look at her. “Don’t so what me.”
“So what if I have to depend on someone else for something? God forbid that ever happens.”
Her dad takes his cigarette out of his mouth. “Holly, look. I’m gonna tell you this because you’re a smart girl.” His tone is stern as he speaks but not scolding. She can hear the edge in it, and for a moment Holly feels bad for him. “You don’t know who’s out there in the world. I don’t know either. But real nice people—people who are willing to help you—are really fucking rare.”
A moment of silence follows. She knows that he speaks from experience, that he wants the best for her (and what other reasons he likes to give), even if he gets mad a lot more these days. She does, too. Maybe they get it from each other.
He continues, “What happens when I get hurt? I won’t always be around either, you know that. The only person you can always count on is yourself. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
Her eyes haven’t moved away from him, but her response comes a bit delayed anyway. The air is thick with smoke and heat. She understands, of course, what he means when he says either, that it’d be better to nod her head and agree. She’s been biting her tongue a lot lately. “Yeah. I get it, Dad.”
“Good.” He takes the cigarette into his mouth again, taps down the front of his jacket for his lighter. “Besides, you learn the hard stuff now and it only gets easier along the way.”
“Well—I’m not learning anything right now,” she says anyway. Figures she might as well be honest, now that they’re here. “I can’t even start the car.”
“Yeah, not with all that complaining,” her dad dismisses. “If you’d simply shut up and tried again we’d be driving around the block by now.”
She feels the heat disintegrate inside of her at the sound of his response. It’s not worth it, she thinks, to start a fight.
He nudges her shoulder and rubs gently. “Come on, try again, honey.”
“Yeah,” Holly sighs. The cramping in her leg has turned into a numbing pain. It’s light enough to ignore and so she does. She slams the brakes, gets her other foot on the clutch, and turns the key.
A few weeks later, Holly and her dad drive through the woods. What was supposed to be a quick ride up north has stretched out all throughout the afternoon as her dad deals with his most recent case. It turns out he does need a personal chauffeur after all, someone to drive him from bar to store, back and forth. While getting some experience in for her too, of course. Two birds, one stone. A nagging feeling tells her neither of these two reasons are quite right.
Now, on their way back, the sun has gone down already. The roads go around in loops, splitting thick trees apart. She keeps her foot at a specific angle so that she only has to steer left, right, left. It all looks mostly the same, in the dark.
The radio crackles every now and then, playing tunes of tinny sounding high-pitched voices her father hums along to.
It is in a moment of distraction that something skitters across the road—Holly hits the brakes, holds the steering wheel straight. It’s too late, her reaction, and the car thuds as it collides.
“Holly—” Her dad leans forward, looking up. Holly’s frozen. “Pull over, right there,” he says as she drives away from the main road. He steps out and walks to the front of the car.
Holly leaves too, a bit delayed. She walks in the opposite direction.
The moonlight illuminates the flecks of blood on the road well enough for her to follow them. She does, until she hears a pained whimper. Just where all the shrubbery of the forest is beginning to grow, lies a little deer, a few weeks old at most. Its legs are twisted where the flesh lies open, grazed by what she can only assume to have been the outer frame of her car.
Her face runs cold.
“Holly,” her father calls. “What are you doing here?”
Holly doesn’t turn around. Her heart is beating so fast she feels weak all of the sudden, sweating hot and cold, insides clamming up. She feels sick, like she could throw up her dinner.
“Jesus,” her father says. “Is that the animal we hit?”
“It's… hurt,” she finally manages to get out. Her voice feels so small.
“Yeah, it is.” Her father takes a breath. They watch, together. The deer shakes and shakes like it's freezing. “It’s not looking good.”
“I—” she opens her mouth. She wants to cry. No tears will come out. “I didn’t mean to, I—”
“I know, sweetheart. It happens.”
She turns to her father. “Can’t we call the police? Or, or animal service—I mean, there’s something we gotta do, don’t they—”
“Holly, the last pay phone we passed was twenty minutes ago.”
“I can get it—”
“That was by car,” he says, sounding unbelievably calm. “And we’re in the middle of nowhere. It’s gonna take too long for anyone to arrive.”
“Still—” She feels her voice break. “We—we gotta do something. Dad, come on, it’s hurt.”
Holly dares to look to the side again: she sees it now, more clearly, light brown against green appearing almost purple in the night. The bone protrudes from the soft flesh that’s been bruised. Flecks of white on its belly and side have been dyed black with blood. A wound that’s much too big, she knows. It won't stop shuddering, its bony legs shaking, like it wants to run and curl up into a ball.
“It’s a wild animal, Holly. We can’t take it.” He moves closer to it anyway, and for a second Holly can see it flinch like it's trying to jump away. “Look at it, it was already hurt before you hit it.”
"But— Dad." It should change things, but really, it doesn’t. “We can’t just leave it—”
“Well, Holly, what the fuck do you want me to do?” Her dad snaps.
“I don’t know!” She yells, sobbing. She has no idea what the fuck they can do about it, this baby deer she hit is going to die, she can’t change that, and it’s her fault, she was behind that wheel.
Tears keep streaming and streaming down her cheek. She feels sick to her stomach, a tightness in her throat. It’s the first time she’s felt truly helpless in a while, knowing that there’s nothing she can do now—and thinks of her mother’s lifeless body, what of it they pulled out from the fire. The baby deer that will die within a few hours.
“Hey, hey, sweetheart.” Her dad pulls her into a hug. His voice shifts. “It’s not your fault. Look at me.” He wipes the tears off her face with his thumbs, strokes the loose strands of her hair away. “You did what you could.”
It doesn’t comfort her that much. “It would’ve lived, Dad—if I hadn’t hit it.” Her voice croaks.
“You don’t know that.” He rubs her shoulder, holding her tighter. “Sweetheart, you don’t know that. Don’t beat yourself up over it.”
She wants nothing more than to believe her father, but his words don’t seem to reach her. She keeps replaying the moments leading up to the accident, and how she could’ve avoided it if she hadn’t been so stupid, so reckless. There’d been enough room to swerve, do anything else except freeze and watch. It is her fault, she killed the deer, the little baby. It’s gonna die, it’s gonna die, she keeps thinking, or saying out loud. She can’t tell.
Holly peels herself off from her father’s shirt. The deer hasn’t stopped whimpering. It’s still shaking. It looks just as scared as before. She wants to stroke its fur, tell it that everything is going to be okay somehow. Not that it would understand her, she knows. But she thinks every living being would want to feel a comforting warmth in the last moments of its life.
“There’s gotta be something we can do, Dad.” Her voice is still shaky.
Her dad looks at it, then sighs. “I’ll—I’ll go get my gun. I’ll make it quick.”
She stands there, her face still drenched in tears. The cool air hits her face. She nods, hesitantly.
“Stay back.” Her father walks back. “Cover your ears.”
Holly turns away. She doesn’t see her father put the deer out of its misery, can only imagine it, with the bullet cutting through the air.
It’s silent afterwards, for a long time. Her dad puts his jacket around her. Once her tears stop flowing, she just feels tired. Like she could sleep forever. It's been a long year. Maybe the longest year of her life.
Holly drives a new car now, with her father in the passenger seat. His fingers drum on the outer side of the door, still glossy with a fresh coat of varnish. It’s an automatic, one of those nicer, older models he could finally afford with one of his recent checks. She almost likes driving it—it’s a lot more comfortable, easier to operate.
While her left leg still aches with the memory, the rumble of the clutch, she can control the car well enough by now. Her dad doesn’t have to bother. There are no gears he has to remind her to shift and so his eyes fall shut as he drifts off to another comfortable boozed up mid-day slumber. His humming fades out, and is replaced by a loud silence, the blaring of cars.
She stops the car a bit too abruptly at a red light, perhaps to see if he’d scold her for it, if he’d been paying attention. He’s not: his head bobs forward, lifeless. It almost looks funny.